Distant Stars Mod both Rebellion and Diplomacy (Trinity) supported.

Under new management.....sort of

First I would like to take the thank rjhughes67 for taking up this project. Nacey has had a lot of things on his plate and so he has not gotten around to Distant Stars lately. He says he will occasionally pop in with comments and ideas but his time is being taken up else where. I, Ryat, will continue to be forum moderator and master bug hunter for this project. And maybe the occasional change/addition.

Second I would like to thank Nacey, -Ue_Carbon, Draakjacht, Stant123 and Skyline (the originator of this mod) for all of their hard work on this project. Also give thanks to all the modders whose mod projects we used, abused and otherwise mutilated for our own mod.

And finally to our fans. Let's face it. Sins of a Solar Empire is a very moddable game and there are some excellent mods out there. We thank you for sticking with us.

Ryat, Just a little update from my end. Downloads were a little slow the other day as my Mediafire account was hammered by everyone getting new versions of everything. 100 DS downloads and I have not heard too much so that must be good, I hope. I have started working on some fixes for a new Rebellion download . (1) Ship Graveyard structure showing a (da) Texture is fixed & (2) Looking into why Bailknights weapon effects don't seem to be working. I have noticed that the Capital Ship and Frigate entity files don't use the Bailknights weapon particle effects. Is this on purpose ? Were they changed for some reason? I Did activate Bailknights with DS and saw no difference in it, might be a RAM issue but not sure. I might try and remove the Sol System Planets to lighten the load just for some testing on that.... Need someone to start looking into the maps. I noticed some of them were causing some crashing because they were referencing some meshes that are not in game. Do you know If some were removed? I think It was the CB maps.

Last thing is if there is a large call for a non-DLC version, it should be fairly easy to do once this version is close too where you want it.

I am one of those who downloaded, so hi and thanks for all the work on getting DS up to date!

Finished my first 1.8+DLC`s+DS game just yet. Played Vasari Loyalists in a 5on5 teamfight with hard AI's. Working really good on my side. No crashes except for the obvious minidump because i wanted to check out the looks of the planets and ships in all their highest-texture-setting glory. Apart from some very minor tooltip things i havent really come across any bugs either, so yeah, very stable version so far, great stuff.

The things ive noticed:

- The tooltip for "Gas Giant Colonization" reads "Allows colonization of Gas Giants, Military and City planets." Should be Urban, right?

- The tooltip for improved tunneling lists "Max population increase: x%" 11 times. I guess its one per planet type but one would definately be enough given the description text at the bottom clearly stating that the bonus affects all planet types.

- Not sure if it's a problem only related to my PC but the textures for the space station at Ship Graveyards seem a little buggy. They're all in pink, bright green and purple for me. Seems like a problem with the shadows, as the side of the station facing the sun looks relatively normal.

That's all ive come across in around 6h of playtime though. I'll make sure to drop in when i notice anything else.

- The tooltip for improved tunneling lists "Max population increase: x%" 11 times. I guess its one per planet type but one would definately be enough given the description text at the bottom clearly stating that the bonus affects all planet types.

- Not sure if it's a problem only related to my PC but the textures for the space station at Ship Graveyards seem a little buggy. They're all in pink, bright green and purple for me. Seems like a problem with the shadows, as the side of the station facing the sun looks relatively normal.

Quoting Kavoriken, reply 8- The tooltip for improved tunneling lists "Max population increase: x%" 11 times. I guess its one per planet type but one would definately be enough given the description text at the bottom clearly stating that the bonus affects all planet types.Pretty sure that's hard coded.

If it's for all planets you can use one line with "Invalid" as the planet type IIRC.

I was playing this solo,and having some fun with it, but on Med/Random map about 2 hours in... I was getting frequent crashes... specifically during a planet I was trying to take out. (Used auto save to recover, no corruption atleast)

I didn't see any mini dumps. Although this is my fault likely from trying to combine Distant Stars with Real Capital Ships Mod on ricks (I did use updated 1.8 verison)

I have noticed that the Capital Ship and Frigate entity files don't use the Bailknights weapon particle effects. Is this on purpose ? Were they changed for some reason? I Did activate Bailknights with DS and saw no difference in it, might be a RAM issue but not sure.

I'm not sure if this is exactly the problem, but I have a lot of people who want to use your version of Bailknights and Enhanced 4X together, and I have to tell them they can't (or rather it won't work the way they expect) because of the way you have it set up. In Rebellion, all the particle effect names were changed, and thus all my frigate entity files use the Rebellion names. Your version of Bailknights simply changes all the entity files to go back to using the old names, which will cause compatibility issues with mods that change these same entities to do other things. Either the weapons effects will not change if you load E4X first, or you get game breaking bugs if you load Bailknights first.

If this is also the problem with Distant Stars, the ideal solution would be to rework your Bailknights mod so it changes the names of the particle effects to the new Rebellion names, rather than changing ship entity files. That way when you enable both mods together, the Vanilla particles will get overwritten but the gameplay changes to the ships will be maintained. While I realize Bailknights may have tweaked some ship entity files as well for visual purposes, as long as the particle effects are correctly named at least they'll be loaded correctly even if some minor details are off.

Lavo is correct. (As of the Diplomacy 0.8 build I think it was) I changed it to the current specifically because of this. Previously, it was only giving the bonus to the asteroids and gas giants (as they were the 'invalid' class of planets) and it needed to affect all, so all types had to be listed. And yes, it's hard coded and cannot be changed by us, otherwise I would have cleaned it up waaaaaay back when before it ever got released to anyone.

I'm not sure if this is exactly the problem, but I have a lot of people who want to use your version of Bailknights and Enhanced 4X together

Some really good points here. Bailknights wont ever really be a mod that you can run with another mod because of changes to the entity files including Volumetrics Race specific explosions. I will look into renaming the particle files though.

As far as the incorporated Bailknights not working in Distant Stars, that has been solved. The version of DS that I downloaded and updated included an extra's folder that has all the Capital ship entity files that were removed for some reason? They just simply need to be added back in. El Problemo Solved.

I changed it to the current specifically because of this. Previously, it was only giving the bonus to the asteroids and gas giants (as they were the 'invalid' class of planets) and it needed to affect all, so all types had to be listed. And yes, it's hard coded and cannot be changed by us, otherwise I would have cleaned it up waaaaaay back when before it ever got released to anyone.

Ah yes, but, someone must have changed this not to long ago because when I updated DS, Gas Giants, Military and Urban planets were set to "linked planet type Asteroid " and I changed it back to Invalid and in the research had to add the new DLC planet types thus it is now showing 11 entries. So yes Lavo and Stant123 are correct.

Quoting ZombiesRus5, reply 10If it's for all planets you can use one line with "Invalid" as the planet type IIRC.

Pretty sure it wouldn't work; for planets Invalid is actually a real planet group.Lavo is correct. (As of the Diplomacy 0.8 build I think it was) I changed it to the current specifically because of this. Previously, it was only giving the bonus to the asteroids and gas giants (as they were the 'invalid' class of planets) and it needed to affect all, so all types had to be listed. And yes, it's hard coded and cannot be changed by us, otherwise I would have cleaned it up waaaaaay back when before it ever got released to anyone.

Interesting since that is what Organic AI does.

I've also used similar with Cylon's and it definitely decreases planet populations on all planets.

Did you use "Invalid" in a Planet entity as it's type? Maybe this overrides the default behavior of Invalid.

We were/are going to redo the Capital Ships to give them back their power. Rebellion changed a lot of their stats and added new caps and titans so we wanted to do a better job of balancing them out. So we just put in the baseline entity files as a place holder. Great catch and fix, I hope to get the stats on them rebalanced for DS soon.

Ah yes, but, someone must have changed this not to long ago because when I updated DS, Gas Giants, Military and Urban planets were set to "linked planet type Asteroid " and I changed it back to Invalid and in the research had to add the new DLC planet types thus it is now showing 11 entries. So yes Lavo and Stant123 are correct.

I changed them to asteroid, I forget the reason why at the moment. Probably experimenting with something and forgot to change it back. I tinkered a lot back in the day.

I've been enjoying Distant Stars greatly, but have two very general feedback things for the mod :

Really nice to have planetary defences that work well now, especially with upgrades. I do feel that they may be a little too powerful now however, as I'm finding 3-4 Gauss Cannons are taking out multiple hostile capital ships without losses on occasion! What with the huge tiering of upgrades for them now, the bonus to their base stats over vanilla perhaps does not need to be as big, as they can be upgraded quite heavily already.

The new levels of upgrades are very welcome, and can really boost up your fleets. I'm finding that the way they work undermines the principles, though - e.g. a tech has 4 tiers instead of 2 now, but you still need to research all 4 tiers to unlock the next tech down the line. The result is that you will always have all the upgrades before advancing, so there's no increased choice or variety, as all tiers are 'compulsory' in a way. In this regard, more branching 'optional' techs would be better, though as I'm not familiar with Sins modding, I don't know how difficult it might be to add more techs to the trees like that.

Hope to see more great development in future! One personal suggestion springs to mind: adding mid-late game techs that allow for an extra level of tactical (and even logistics) slots to be built on your planets would be a great addition for power-hungry teching in the endgame.

Really nice to have planetary defences that work well now, especially with upgrades. I do feel that they may be a little too powerful now however, as I'm finding 3-4 Gauss Cannons are taking out multiple hostile capital ships without losses on occasion! What with the huge tiering of upgrades for them now, the bonus to their base stats over vanilla perhaps does not need to be as big, as they can be upgraded quite heavily already.

The new levels of upgrades are very welcome, and can really boost up your fleets. I'm finding that the way they work undermines the principles, though - e.g. a tech has 4 tiers instead of 2 now, but you still need to research all 4 tiers to unlock the next tech down the line. The result is that you will always have all the upgrades before advancing, so there's no increased choice or variety, as all tiers are 'compulsory' in a way. In this regard, more branching 'optional' techs would be better, though as I'm not familiar with Sins modding, I don't know how difficult it might be to add more techs to the trees like that.

Research tree modding is a bit limited. True we could add a little more variety but it would complicate matters more then help.